The Blue Light Lady of Fort Hays

Fort Hays began as Fort Fletcher in October 1865, a post meant to protect stagecoaches and freight wagons on the Smoky Hill Trail. After it closed and reopened, a flood on 7 June 1867 nearly destroyed it and killed nine people, and on 23 June the army moved it about fifteen miles northwest, to a site beside the new railway line. That is the fort whose grounds survive near Hays today. That summer, cholera ran through the camp, and through the village of Rome, where about 1,200 railroad workers had gathered nearby.

The woman at the centre of the legend is Elizabeth Polly. Born Elizabeth Decker around 1843, she married Ephraim Polly in Clarke County, Iowa, on 29 May 1864. He was a hospital steward, and when he was posted to Fort Hays she worked as the hospital matron. Folklorist Jim Hoy of Emporia State University says that, whether she was trained as a nurse or simply a compassionate neighbour, she comforted the dying during the outbreak and died of the disease herself later in 1867. According to tradition she asked to be buried at the top of Sentinel Hill, a limestone bluff where she liked to walk, but soldiers hit rock a few inches down and buried her at the foot of the hill, in a blue dress and white bonnet, with a military funeral. Four limestone posts marked the grave; the story goes that four men who stole them soon died violent deaths. Her exact grave has never been identified, and historians point out that her presence at the fort rests on thin documentation.

The ghost story appears long after her death. Hoy dates the first report to 1917, when farmer John Schmidt saw a woman in a blue dress walk into a farm building near the hill and found nobody inside. A tale from the early 1950s, told in several versions, has a police officer on patrol in thick fog radioing that he had hit a woman in blue with a white bonnet, only to find no body and no damage to his car. Witnesses since then describe a hazy blue glow, a figure in a prairie dress and bonnet, or footsteps on the hill. Sentinel Hill became a “legend trip” destination for Hays students, especially at Halloween.

The city has embraced her as a figure of kindness rather than fear. A pyramid-shaped monument was set on Sentinel Hill in 1967, and in 1982 Hays created Elizabeth Polly Park with a statue by sculptor Peter Felten Jr. The Kansas Historical Society runs Fort Hays as a state historic site. Hoy observes that when he spoke on Kansas legends at the Hays Public Library, no one in the audience had actually seen the Blue Light Lady, though everyone knew her story.

Witnesses describe a woman in a blue prairie dress and bonnet, a misty blue light drifting over Sentinel Hill and sometimes the sound of footsteps in the dirt. The apparition is said to fade before reaching the ground, and in the police story to vanish when the car strikes her.

Sentinel Hill southwest of Fort Hays and the roads around it, especially on foggy nights and at Halloween; also the grounds of Elizabeth Polly Park.

The legend appears in Kansas folklore and ghost books, in the Humanities Kansas talk “The Legend of the Blue Light Lady” by Jim Hoy, and in the statue and park in Hays that honour Elizabeth Polly.